NVIDIA DLSS 5 announced and it's all about that AI generation

The one positive thing about this could be cheap pt-like lighting - assuming it is cheap and assuming path tracing isn't a requirement here to go along with DLSS 5.

Looking at those images not for one moment do I believe lighting is the only thing DLSS 5 affects.

natural blond hair turned into dark hair with blonde dye but showing darker roots

reduced forehead so she looks more hairy than baldy

a hint of sadness/loneliness in her look turned to an obstinate stare

natural lips turned to lip gloss makeup

neck and fingers turned more muscular

everything else in the scene looks more blurry instead of sharper (i guess someone used too many bokeh photos in the training set?!)

and my all-time favourite: the rain drainage grill at her left looks like it turned into one of those rubber elevator carpets that look like a lego plate

yeah, it really captured the essence of this scene... blondie in a red leather jacket

Last edited by Marlock on 17 Mar 2026 at 10:12 am UTC

This is just terrible. This means more lighting artifacting, as it's bad enough with dark areas having lines or arc of color in the background when a scene gets lit up under low light, especially noticeable in YouTube videos after YouTube's compression and the horrible VP9 codec has been added. After five years of having my 32" curved 2560x1440 monitors I have managed to remove the light arc, by adjusting my monitor's hidden contrast settings, which acts a bit like Vignette, but not so aggressive. The shots of Grace from Requiem is just too far in my opinion. NVIDIA may as well go the whole hog and say bye, bye Computer graphics get real humans on screen, with real human zombies and tons of real blood and gore. Players will be so scared, they'll be throwing up everywhere. Not to mention even more power coming from the wall, plus game will either bottleneck or lose FPS with this added AI Mask over the top. So glad I'm running a 4060 Ti with 16GB of rammage and 32GB on board Ram. No way I'm upgrading to a 5080 or 5090, as in my opinion NVIDIA should be concentrating going back to 8pin power for their cards, not relying on this 12pin all the time, as so many people are still having their connectors melting. Yes I know it can happen with 8pin as well, but at least 8pin is more reliable.

Quoting: WanderdueneI'm not surprised to see something like this popping up in the Redering pipeline now. I'm torn about that. For games with a realistic look, this could be the final step toward achieving true photorealism. On the other hand, that could lead to more AI-generated look and make everything look increasingly generic. I really hope the developer has control over what gets used. As a developer, I'd be pissed if Nvidia's AI replaced my visual style or the appearance of characters with an AI-generated look without control over it.

To me it seems fundamentally impossible that this will ever work well. DLSS only has the current frame to work with, so all of the information used to add whatever it adds to scene NVIDIA has to pull out of their ass. This is also true for upscaling which is why it will always have all the artifacts, but made up details that don't make any sense are obviously way worse.

Quoting: rustynail

Quoting: WanderdueneI'm not surprised to see something like this popping up in the Redering pipeline now. I'm torn about that. For games with a realistic look, this could be the final step toward achieving true photorealism. On the other hand, that could lead to more AI-generated look and make everything look increasingly generic. I really hope the developer has control over what gets used. As a developer, I'd be pissed if Nvidia's AI replaced my visual style or the appearance of characters with an AI-generated look without control over it.

To me it seems fundamentally impossible that this will ever work well. DLSS only has the current frame to work with, so all of the information used to add whatever it adds to scene NVIDIA has to pull out of their ass. This is also true for upscaling which is why it will always have all the artifacts, but made up details that don't make any sense are obviously way worse.

It's going to be even worse. AAA studios are on-board according to nvidia. Which probably means that upper management is on-board because they see another opportunity for them to do less work and let dlss5 "pick up the slack". They did it with other forms of upscaling, they did it with raytracing and they're going to want to do it with this.

I'm so sick of it that I've started refunding everything that doesn't run properly without upscaling and this only reinforces it. I don't want this crap. At least now we know that both nvidia and digital foundry are truly dead. But what will amd do? I await in fear.

Quoting: rustynailTo me it seems fundamentally impossible that this will ever work well. DLSS only has the current frame to work with, so all of the information used to add whatever it adds to scene NVIDIA has to pull out of their ass. This is also true for upscaling which is why it will always have all the artifacts, but made up details that don't make any sense are obviously way worse.

To be clear, I don't know what this press release sentence means, and I'm not enthused about this whole schtick. But, this might be relevant to them claiming they can pull that off:

materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: rustynailTo me it seems fundamentally impossible that this will ever work well. DLSS only has the current frame to work with, so all of the information used to add whatever it adds to scene NVIDIA has to pull out of their ass. This is also true for upscaling which is why it will always have all the artifacts, but made up details that don't make any sense are obviously way worse.

To be clear, I don't know what this press release sentence means, and I'm not enthused about this whole schtick. But, this might be relevant to them claiming they can pull that off:

materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame.

One specific related thing I was thinking about is that because DLSS makes character faces kinda glow, it seems to sort of put fake light sources above them that don't actually exist, so I think it has no idea what is actually happening in the scene, and maybe even doesn't really have any real concept of lighting (at least in the sense in which it would be explicitly accessible to devs so they could actually tell what the model is doing rather than just spitting pixels out based on some unfathomable statistics or whatever). Tbh now that I think about it more, my argument about it only knowing about one or few frames is probably not even that important, because if something is not in the game then it's not in the game and it's going to be made up in any case, whether it's nonsensical faces or subtle random color changes all over the place.

Quoting: EhvisImagine being an honest game artist and seeing your creation ruined like that. I guess there is one positive thing. You can now filter out developers that don't care about art simply by their dlss5 support!

Not really, because the artists much likely won't be the ones making the decisions unless we're talking about smaller companies.